The purpose of this application is to complete the first book-length study of the life of Abraham Flexner. Although scores of papers and books have been written about his influential report of 1910 on medical education, remarkably little is known about the greater part of his career. Only the study by Steven Wheatley on The Politics of Philanthropy (1988) has dealt in any depth with his career at the Rockefeller Foundation. In that position, he was able to shape critically the direction of medical study at a dozen elite universities, and his judgments have been the subject of controversy among medical educators and historians ever since. Almost nothing has been written about his influence on medical education outside the United States, although it was considerable, notably in Great Britain and Canada. Perhaps not more than a tenth of the voluminous archival material bearing on his life and career has been explored. That material is spread over a score or more archives across the nation and in Europe. The research questions are endless, provocative, and largely unanswered. What were the family, educational, and intellectual influences that shaped his life and thought? How is his remarkable career to be understood in the context of the rapidly changing America of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries? How was he able to amass so much power over medical education and why did he ultimately fail to maintain it? What does his career tell us about the ability of a wealthy private organization to shape public policy by identifying intellectual elites in a democracy? The appeal of such a study could be considerable not only to historians, physicians, and educators but also to a larger audience that sees biography as an effective way to understand the interplay of human personality and large social movements.